Professor Feargal Cochrane, from the University’s School of Politics and International Relations has been elected to the position of PSA UK Vice Chair.

He will be working closely with the new Chair, Professor Angie Wilson (University of Manchester) to push forward the strategic aims of the PSA, further develop its international profile and refine its operational efficiency.

Professor Cochrane, Professor of International Conflict Analysis, has been a serving and active member of the PSA for 25 years and has pro-actively encouraged new thinking and reform to deal with the pressures facing academics across the career ladder.

The new team was announced on Friday 3 February and will be formally at this year’s PSA Annual Conference in Glasgow, where they will outline their plans for the future development of the PSA and the implementation of its new 10 year strategic plan.

They formally take over the PSA reins in June and the term of office lasts until May 2020.

As part of the School of Politics and International Relations Public Speaker Programme, we are pleased to welcome Celia Mckeon, who has worked for almost twenty years with people who are trying to build peace in contexts of violent conflict. These experiences have persuaded her that we need to urgently rethink our approach to security in general, and not just in countries affected by violent conflict. How we choose to think about what security means, and what we choose to believe about how we create it, has a profound bearing on the kind of society we live in, the kind of relationships we have with others in the world, and the kind of future we will create for the generations to come.

Celia will be presenting Rethinking security in a violent world. The lecture will cover three areas: a brief analysis of current global security trends and the factors that drive insecurity; the dominant responses to global insecurity and how these are falling short; and some ideas about what a different approach to security might look like and how it might work in practice.

The talk will take place on Wednesday 1 March 2017 at 17.00 in Grimond Lecture Theatre 3, followed by a drinks reception in Grimond Foyer.

This is a free event and booking is not required. All are welcome to attend and we look forward to seeing you there. For further information, please contact polirnews@kent.ac.uk.

Following the success of last year’s competition, Professor Ray Laurence, from the Department of Classical & Archaeological Studies, is running the animated script writing competition for school children in years 7 to 13, again this year. The competition is supported by the Pro Vice Chancellor’s Public Engagement Fund and follows on from the success of Ray’s two TED-Ed films, A Glimpse of Teenage Life in Ancient Rome and Four Sisters in Ancient Rome, which have had over 8 million views on YouTube.

The competition invites students to write a script focussing on migration in the Roman Empire. It is an exciting way for students to use their knowledge about Rome and its people to develop their own stories and can help with revision. The lucky winner will receive £100 and have the chance to have their script turned into an animated film. Professor Ray Laurence is working with an animator to produce a film based on the winning script from last year’s competition and we hope to have an update soon.

The script should be no more than a 1,000 words and the deadline for entries is 21.00 on 31 March 2017.

Further information about the competition and the entry form are available on the Lucius’ Romans blog at https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/lucius-romans/2017-animation-script-writing-competition-for-uk-schools-and-colleges-years-7-to-13/

The University of Kent and Kent Union are taking part in the national awareness week and opening up discussion on campus around consent, domestic abuse, sexual abuse and sexual violence.

Events and activities are taking place throughout the week that are open to anyone to attend.
All events are open to any student or staff member.

The University of Kent and Kent Union takes incidents of sexual assault and rape extremely seriously. For advice, support and further information please see: www.kent.ac.uk/itsnotok

Don’t forget to check our twitter feeds @ukcstudent for more information and to join in the national discussion #itsnotok

More Information:
Sexual Respect @ Kent leaflets – http://bit.ly/2jRJNwA
#ThinkKent video on domestic violence prevention – http://bit.ly/2ks1FAc
Tea & Consent campaign video – https://vimeo.com/128105683

The Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB) will be holding its annual meeting at the University on 4-7 September 2017.

The association welcomes abstracts on any topic in the field of linguistics. They will particularly welcome papers from areas of linguistics that have not been well represented in previous meetings in order to capture the diversity of research currently undertaken in the UK and beyond.

Abstracts may be for individual papers or themed sessions for groups of speakers. All abstracts will be blind-peer-reviewed by an international committee of reviewers. Both members and non-members are invited to offer papers for the meeting. The length for papers/presentations delivered at the LAGB 2016 meeting is 20 minutes (plus 10 minutes’ discussion).

Abstracts should be submitted as Word documents (no more than two pages) and sent anonymously. The deadline for submissions is Saturday 1 April 2017, with notification of acceptance to be made in late May 2017.

For full details of the conference and submissions procedure, please see:
www.lagb.org.uk/LAGB2017CfP/

Dr Alex Marlow-Mann, Lecturer in Italian in the Department of Modern Languages, is to deliver a lecture on the subject of ‘Regional Cinema: Micro-mapping and the Glocalisation of Film Studies’ at the University of Pittsburgh (USA) on Monday 13 February 2017.

In recent years, film studies has undergone a transnational turn, largely in response to the accelerating effects of globalisation. While this has served as a useful corrective to the simplistic and uncritical ways in which the national cinema paradigm has sometimes been employed, it also risks downplaying cultural specificities and homogenising disparate film cultures. Thus a new regional turn to complement and counterbalance this development is required.

Drawing on the idea of glocalisation, Dr Marlow-Mann’s presentation will argue that globalisation does not involve the erasure of the local but rather a complex interplay between the global and the local. Thus, in recent decades, regional cinemas operating at sub-national level have achieved renewed significance. Film studies has so far paid little attention to such cinemas, which actually date back to the earliest days of cinema. A shift in perspective is therefore necessary, leading to the adoption of a methodology based around the micro-mapping of production contexts, the circulation of films and variations in styles and genres at the sub-national level, which would complement macro- and transnational approaches.

Further details of the lecture can be found at:
www.english.pitt.edu/event/film-studies-presents-alexander-marlow-mann

Kent colleagues and doctoral students are invited to submit a paper, panel or roundtable proposal for the Second Annual Tartu Conference on Russian and East European Studies, taking place in Tartu, Estonia, from 4 – 6 June 2017.

The deadline for proposals is 20 February, 2017. The Programme Committee welcomes proposals addressing the conference theme (the Russian revolution and its legacies) as well as any other issues relevant to the development of Russia, the rest of the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe from any disciplinary angle. Paper, panel or roundtable proposals can be submitted here.

The Tartu Conference is a convention-type event that is organised each year around a particular theme, while also serving as a venue for a broad academic discussion of the fundamental cultural, social, economic and political trends affecting all aspects of people’s life in Russia and Eastern Europe. It is organised jointly by the Centre for EU-Russia Studies at the University of Tartu, the Global Europe Centre at the University of Kent, and the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Uppsala University. The conference will be supported by the European Commission under a Horizon 2020 Twinning project entitled “Building Research Excellence in Russian and East European Studies at the Universities of Tartu, Uppsala and Kent” (UPTAKE).

Please share this information with PhD students within your School.
We look forward to seeing you in Tartu in June!

The Programme Committee:
Viacheslav Morozov, University of Tartu
Stefan Hedlund, Uppsala University
Elena Korosteleva, University of Kent